Timeskips
by peonylanterns
Summary: There's an intimacy in the violence, a certain tenderness in the way that he holds your neck between his hands, that speaks to a deeper past between the two of you. Sans/Reader. Critique heavily encouraged. Contains violence, gore.
1. Timeline 53 (a)

[Timeline 53]

The first couple of deaths had been slow - brutal, agonizing sessions of what seemed like atonement - but oddly intimate. Through them all he'd speak to you, his voice a soft caress even as his hands bruised and broke you. You remember your throat clutched between his fingers, windpipe constricting as you fought for breath, and in your ear Sans's whispered shushes, quietly reprimanding you for the mess of tears and drool running down your swollen face.

Disgusting, he'd said and squeezed harder, to think I could've ever loved something as low as you. Black spots had begun to dot the edges of your vision and your desperate fingers had struggled to interlace with his in a parody of handholding, trying to loosen the vice around your neck. His grip had slackened then, if only for a moment, then returned with renewed vigor.

It's only with your throat in his hands and the warmth of your blood dripping down his arms that you ever touch each other in this timeline. The feeling of bone against skin conjures up a faded dream of affection, a lingering persistence that mixes a certain tenderness into the violence and dulls the pain through a veil of residual memory. There's a small part of you that, even as the whole of your body screams at him to stop, wants to beg him to keep on going, to keep on smashing you into golden tile so long as you can feel his hands as he does it.

* * *

During your sixth reload you experimentally touch his face when he slams you against a wall and Sans jerks away as though he's been stung. He instinctively takes a few steps back, the lights in his eyes shrinking to pinpricks. For a few seconds there's no movement save the bead of sweat running down his skull, no sound but those of his shaky breaths. In that moment you think briefly about what it might feel like to slip your hand under that white shirt, what his teeth might feel like against your neck, what it'd be like to fling your knife behind you and throw yourself to to his feet, begging him to forgive you -

Instead you take a swing at him with a clenched fist and manage to just brush the sleeve of his jacket. Before your arm finishes its downward arc, you catch a glimpse of enveloping white flame bursting from a cage of bone.

Melting into ash feels almost like absolution.

* * *

There's no more touching after that.

The deaths begin feeling less like murders and more like executions. Instead of lazily directing fragments of bone towards your legs to cripple you, now he summons barrages of light and ivory that close in until there's nothing left of you but shreds of torn flesh.

You begin to realize that up until now he's only been toying with you. You begin to realize that you're totally fucked.

And yet he looks almost afraid of you, as if he knows that he'll crumble to pieces under the soft weight of your hands.

When you appear in that yellow lit corridor, bones begin jutting jaggedly from the floors and the walls before you can even begin walking towards him. Sans keeps his distance now, and keeps his face as expressionless as he can when he materializes those yawning canine skulls towards you.


	2. Timeline 53 (b)

[Timeline 53, continued]

He wants so badly to pretend that it isn't you, that the girl standing before him is somebody else wrapped up in your empty skin. A wolf in sheep's clothing, Sans tells himself, but he knows that despite your best efforts you've never been a sacrificial lamb, eager to place yourself at everyone's mercy. Even your best iterations carry with them a sense of vested self interest and basic human fallibility.

No, this chalky-fingered human is entirely you. This is you as a sniveling dog in a shroud of white dust, hiding beneath good intentions. He had known it the moment you'd reduced his brother to a heap of pale ash, your mouth mumbling an apology to the empty red scarf laying limply in the snow. He had known it the moment you'd gently filtered the dust that had once been Undyne over the echo flowers in the marsh.

He had known it the moment you'd laid your hand against his cheek: softly, with your palm cradling the underside of his jaw, the way you'd used to in the early hours of the morning.

At that touch a shameful swell of lust had lurched through him, and it's with the utmost self-disgust that Sans acknowledges the fact that he'll never be able to extricate himself from past timelines, that even with your hands freshly caked in dust the persistence of memory will always try to cast you in his mind as a previous incarnation. He's filled with a fearful ambivalence, wanting to feel the splintering of bone and the sweetness of flesh at the same time.

Sans thinks about tearing your tongue out with his teeth and watching you drown in your own blood, about rutting against you on the floor before tearing you into pieces.

God. He feels so filthy.


	3. Timeline 53 (c)

[Timeline 53, continued]

Your hands are scrabbling at his back, they clutch at his ribs and twist in the soft fabric of his jacket. There's red froth gathering at the corner of your lips, coating the words you choke from your punctured lungs with blood.

"Please," you murmur, "Please..."

Sans hesitates, then haltingly cradles your head into the crook of his neck. He's tangling his fingers in your hair and gripping you to his chest so hard that you're wheezing for breath, a thin whistle of leaking air bursting from your open mouth (your lungs rapidly deflating like popped balloons), but it's ok, it's alright, it's worth it for this illusion of affection. You'd accepted this outcome the moment he'd extended his arm to you, beckoning you forth like an old lover.

* * *

"Do you remember me?" he'd asked, desperate hopefulness coloring his features.

You'd taken a faltering step forward, knife already loosening in your grip.

I don't, you'd wanted to say, You're only a shadow of a dream to me, a memory that I'm not even sure is rooted in reality. But why else this slow throb of desire knotting your throat? Why else this sudden pang of inexplicable tenderness luring you close, like a dusty moth to a bright blue flame?

"Please, if you're listening, let's forget all this."

It's such a glaringly obvious trap, but then he'd said your name, his voice soft and pleading, and you'd known that you'd already been snared.

* * *

By now you've learned how to measure the distance towards death by degrees.

It starts with a numbness in your fingertips, loosening your hold on Sans' coat. And then the seeping cold, sinking into your bones little by little until you're a trembling mess, your muscles twitching in an attempt to generate warmth. Your balance begins to go and you let your body sag against him, pressing shamelessly into the curve of his ribs.

Fatigue settles like a fog, blurring your vision and weighing down your eyelids. You wonder if he can feel the slowing of your heartbeat in your shattered chest, if he's noticed that the rattling in your breathing is growing louder and louder with each labored breath.

A swell of panic flares up in your stomach and you let out an involuntary whimper. You try to calm yourself the way that you always do, reassuring yourself that for you death is a temporary state of suspension. The familiarity of it all should suppress the primal fear that always sets in when you're close to the end, but deep down you know that you'll never get used to dying like this.

Sans holds you tighter when your shuddering body finally begins to quiet and you slump limply against him. He presses his mouth close to your ear and speaks one final sentence to you while you're still conscious in his arms.

"If you've ever, ever, felt anything for me, you won't come back."


	4. Interlude

[Interlude]

Sometimes you think you might be a matryoshka doll, with all of its multiple selves nested inside each other. The outermost doll that holds all the others is the current you, and locked behind it are all of your past selves, each one smaller and more crudely formed as you delve deeper and deeper. But they're still there, making up the core of yourself. They remain like little seeds of dreams, faded signs and symbols nudging you along.

* * *

You're holding 52 past selves inside you. You're listening to the whispers of 52 iterations of yourself. You're clutching within you the jumbled memories of 52 lives of which you have only the faintest trace of recognition.

Sans said that he'd loved you once. Which one had it been, you wonder, and is there a single trace of her in this dust-covered you?

* * *

Each of your deaths weighs on your soul like a lodestone, gathering to it some darkness that must have always been inside of you, magnifying and drawing it around you like a cold veil. It breeds a hard knot of anger in your chest that winds itself tighter and tighter - you're only human, after all. The nature of your species is bound up in its desperate intensity, in its peculiar drive towards violent impulse. What is man but an animal that has gained a soul?

A beast caught in a trap will tear itself apart trying to escape. You're willing to destroy yourself and the things that you love if it'll end this purgatory of recursion, this infinitely looping world that creates and destroys itself with your death and rebirth.

* * *

A half remembered phrase comes to mind.

"If you have some special power, isn't it your responsibility to do the right thing?"

You'd laugh if it weren't so sad. An image of buttercups dotted with blood flicks past your mind's eye, dust cradled in the petals of golden flowers, a tremulous young voice in your ear, begging you to wake up. A naive plan concocted with the guileless cruelty of a child. That's all it had been.

This time it had been snow streaked grey with ash, empty houses and lonely footpaths. The sizzle of burning electronics mixed with the low hum of the Core. A golden hallway filled with light and bone. And at its very end, a fragment of memory.


	5. Timelines 54-57

[Timeline 54]

Snow is gathering in soft heaps on the roof of an empty sentry station.

The sentry himself is standing in front of the rusted door to the ruins, blankets of snow forming on his shoulders and piling in the hood of his jacket. His hands are clenched in his pockets and he stares straight ahead, waiting.

Somewhere in the ruins, a butterscotch cinnamon pie is baking. Somewhere in the ruins, you're tying a faded red ribbon into your hair while chewing a piece of distinctly non-licorice flavored taffy. Somewhere in the ruins, a Vegetoid contentedly settles back into the dirt. A Whimsun flutters nervously above an underground stream. The stone tiles underfoot remain clean of dust.

Sans listens for the crackle of flame, for Toriel's desperate pleas for you to go back upstairs - but they never come.

* * *

[Timeline 55]

Papyrus regards his brother's newfound diligence with a mix of cautious optimism and confusion. For two weeks now, Sans has been waking up early to man his post at the edge of the woods, sometimes even spending nights camped out in the snow.

When pressed about it he only shrugs and dodges Papyrus' questions with jokes about having developed a renewed "dead-ication" to his job. But there's something a little panicked in his smile, a little hint of anxiety in Sans' voice when he starts constantly asking him to run errands in Hotland and pick up water sausages for him in Waterfall. It feels like his brother is constantly looking over his shoulder, waiting for something to emerge from the locked door in the mountain.

* * *

[Timeline 56]

The door remains shut. Sans begins to wonder if it might stay that way.

* * *

[Timeline 57]

Here's the reason why Sans isn't too concerned when he sees a figure rifling through his post as he walks back to it that night:

Snowy has no mother to pack him box lunches anymore. The kid's too proud to ask for help but not too proud to accept freebies, and by now he and Sans have established an unspoken agreement. Sans will usually leave a pastry or some fries at his post when he's off duty, and most days the food will be gone by the time that he comes back.

So when he returns to his post after dinner, he's not at all surprised to see someone already there. He is surprised though, to find you rummaging through his post, practically weeping with relief as you stuff the ear of a Cinnabunny in your mouth. It takes you a couple seconds to notice his presence, but when you see him you frantically gulp down the chunk of half-chewed pastry before speaking.

"Oh shit," you say, "Was this yours?"

Sans stares at you. You've got what looks like a plastic knife sticking out of your pocket and a red ribbon tied sloppily around your wrist, but your clothes look clean, if a bit rumpled. You're furtively ripping off the Cinnabunny's other ear and sticking it in your pocket while proffering the rest of the bun to him in apology, smiling sheepishly at him.

"Sorry about that, man. Didn't see anyone here, and figured nobody would miss it. You, uh, want the rest of it?"

He takes a deep breath and tries to suppress the growing relief spreading through his bones. Careful, he reminds himself, it's too soon to tell.

Then he straightens up and holds out his hand to you.

"Human," he says, "Don't you know how to greet a new pal?"


End file.
